


Without the Leave of Thee

by bottlecapmermaid



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Body Horror, Hux schemes but means well, Kylux Hard Kinks, M/M, child ballad au, hand-kissing, tasteless virginity jokes, weird fae power dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 08:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13714248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bottlecapmermaid/pseuds/bottlecapmermaid
Summary: For the following prompt on kyluxhardkinks: "Freely based on the Ballad ot Tam Lin. Knight and harpist Kylo is abducted by queen Mab. Local sheriff Hux leads an investigation. When he finds Kylo - unhappy, speachless, enchanted - he embraces him and tell that he will never let him go. Mab takes Hux at his worlds. To make Kylo free he must hold him till the morning light. And during the night she shapeshifts Kylo into a number of wild and dangerous beasts and objects (lion bold, bear so grim, burning gleed and so on). Hurtfull sex ensues"Some 700 years later, here's hoping you enjoy, op. They don't explicitly fuck, but like... you know they did





	Without the Leave of Thee

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out I still can't write porn, but I sure can write body horror. Talk to me about The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and/or kylux on tumblr at [thefearofcod](http://thefearofcod.tumblr.com) where I talk about all the things I'm not writing

The Gentry are kind, they are good, they are generous; they are capricious, they are clever, they are bright and cold like the stars. They are beautiful and sharp. Their voices are like a choir of bells and their clothes make kings look like beggars. The hooves of their horses leave gouges and scorch marks in the earth, and the glance of a Lord or Lady’s eye can wither a field as easily as make it prosper. 

Ben has seen them in the corner of his eye as long as he's lived. He sees great black dogs stalking in the moors, he sees pretty red horses standing in the surf, he sees pairs of wicked, glossy black crows chattering in trees. He sees black-haired, pearl-skinned maidens cast on rocks out in the ocean, their legs joined together into fish tails below the knee. He does not listen to their songs, does not row out to sing with them or play his harp. 

He owns only what he carries: his armor, his sword, his harp, his name, his sins. He walks along roads, paths, wild places dark with moss and sick with silence. No horse carries him, only his legs and his feet in his old worn boots. The hobnails in his left heel leave a cross in his wake. He will challenge the Devil himself, should the chance arise. Ben does not fear death or dying or pain. Only failure. 

The last couple months have found him in a village nestled at the edge of a wood, near a cold stone castle. Ben does odd jobs, goes to the little church and prays, and keeps to himself. The sheriff shook him down shortly after his arrival; the man’s hair is fox-red, his mouth turned down the way all soldiers’ mouths are. The sheriff keeps the peace and the order of his people, he protects them from themselves and from bandits and devils and all other ills. On the rare occasions he speaks to Ben, his voice is clipped but not rude. The sheriff and his heavy black wool cloak hold the people under a kind shade. 

The things in the corners of his eyes follow him. One of the children of the village, a barefoot, silent, straw-haired thing, follows him and watches when he plays his music. Its ears end in soft points and it does not blink, and when it vocalizes, it sings old grim songs. He does not speak to it, and he delivers it to Sheriff Hux, who spirits it back to its mother.

Even in a place so quiet and removed, the noise and rush of people becomes too strong for Ben. He goes down to the woods, to the lacy green shadows and the aged, strong trees. Birds watch him, and small creatures hide from him in rotting logs. His feet carry him through the greenwood, and his thoughts carry him throughout the world; he thinks on Percival, on Amadis, on Gawain, and their deeds and failures. They were not perfect, not even Amadis, the best knight in the world. Ben takes comfort in his own inadequacy. 

Lost in his thoughts, in the woods, in the shifting, blurring shades of green, Ben falls. His boot catches on an oak root, and he stumbles, throws out his hands and closes his eyes. By the time he looks up and sees the wide circle of mushrooms surrounding him, it is too late. He’s fallen into a fairy circle and is trapped and damned and he knows it, and that's before he sees the Lady.

People tell tales about the Lady of the greenwood, that she steals children and sours milk and curses flocks and withers crops, and that her fae knights ride wild after boar and wolves and men for the thrill of the hunt alone. They say she is beautiful and cold and that all she touches withers. 

The Lady’s feet do not leave prints in the grass, and her eyes hold all the mercy of a naked sword. Her hands are white and her mantle is green, and when she opens her mouth the sound of high silver bells fills the air. It sets his teeth on edge, he grinds them until he fears they may crack. 

One small step takes her into the circle, one elegant gesture extends a marble-cold hand. Dread freezes Ben’s very blood; if he moves his veins will shatter and leave ruby-red shards in his tender skin.

“What have you done, boy,” she says, “what have you done?” 

He bows his head. He has trespassed into the realm of another, and not just another lord, but the land of another Lady, one who rules by her own alien laws, laws he does not and cannot know. Nobody and nothing can excuse him.

“You've come here uninvited and unwanted. What reason do I have not to let my hounds tear you apart this moment?” 

Ben sees no hounds, only the Lady’s flat eyes and the beringed hand held out to him. “I can sing, my lady,” he croaks at last. He knows as well as anyone that fairies love song and dance, knows the stories about bards singing themselves mute, dancers with feet ground to the bone from days and days of performing. He gestures shakily to his harp. “And I can play.” 

“And yet you carry a sword and wear the carapace of a knight.” 

“I am a knight, my lady.” Better a fairy knight than a fairy harpist; as a knight he might escape or be forgotten, but as a player he will play until mutilation or death. 

“Whom do you serve? I see no lord’s livery upon you. Or are you a stray, run out of land after land until you've nowhere to rest your pretty head?” 

“I serve those in need,” Ben says, truthfully. He serves those who need aid; he is not a king’s man to be aimed like an arrow and let fly at another’s whim.

“Then you must see I am in need,” the Lady says, black lashes fluttering against her cheek. “This my forest is unprotected. Any wicked person might come here and kill my white hart, or cut down my strong oak tree. They might crush my thorns underfoot or hunt my sweet unicorn.” 

He cannot look away from her eyes, black as the places between stars. His heartbeat pounds and makes his breath shake, the only two sounds in the silent wood.

“You will stay here and protect my greenwood,” the Lady says, “will you not? I am in need of a knight, and you have passed into my realm with no leave from me.” 

“I will,” Ben promises, as damned a man as if he'd drunk hemlock, “in exchange for my life.” As long as he has his life, he has hope of escape, and with escape: revenge and freedom.

“For your life,” Queen Mab agrees, and turns on her heel. “You will guard this Carterhaugh of mine for the rest of your life, Kylo Ren.” 

\--

People say that if a fox turned into a man, the man would be Sheriff Hux. Hux does not dispute it, though he is and always has been human. Nothing from beyond the Earthly realm has touched him or his blood.

Winter comes and goes twice. Children venture into the forest and come back silent and wide-eyed, telling tales of a ram-horned beast or a snarling devil with a blade of hellfire. Women go into the forest and come out bloody and speaking in rhymes. Men go into the forest and don't come out. Eventually nobody goes in and only strange animals come out, twisted too-long things with shimmering dark coats and pale eyes.

The frost falls early and the forest looms black and grim; no longer such a greenwood as a blackwood. Hux considers it from the edge of the village and smokes his pipe. The forest is not really his to care for, but the missing men and haunted women and children blank as uncut keys are.

It's autumn, the strange sort where puddles and streams and troughs freeze at night and then dry up under the sun. Frost silvers the red and gold leaves on the ground, and Hux gazes into the trees without blinking until his legs are stiff and his back aches. Nothing moves in the forest that shouldn't. Small, soft things shriek when larger ones hunt and hunger. 

On the fifth day of October, he leaves the village in the hands of his nervous deputy, fills a quiver with arrows, sticks a wicked silver knife down his boot, and wraps his cloak about his shoulders. The forest will not take him without a fight. With his hair, he could blend into the trees at this time of year, so he leaves his hood down.

The silence is an awful, fiendish thing, like being smothered in fresh wool. Hux is not welcome here. Snow has yet to reach the ground through the branches, but he knows how not to be heard when he pleases. Only animal tracks are visible in the soft dirt and underbrush. Magpies and weasels and mice watch him with their glittering, beady eyes, as he moves deeper. Brambles catch at his cloak and scrape against the leather of his boots, squat gnarled roses with blooms nestled close to the thorns.

Hours pass in the close, half-weak light of the forest before Hux rests. He takes bread and a cheese from a purse at his waist and sets his back against an oak, fits his foot at the woody root of one of the roses. Nothing approaches him and his food, and he rests a while at the root of the tree, gazing at a peculiar forked bloom of the rosebush. Its smell is strong and sweet, barely tinged with rot even this late in the season. 

He’s barely pricked his finger on a thorn before the shining tip of a sword touches the naked back of his hand. His gaze follows the impossibly long blade up to a black-gloved fist, and thence up a black-sleeved arm, to a milk-white face and stone-black eyes all crowned with wild black hair. It is nearly the face of Ben Solo, the missing knight whom all had assumed dead in the forest. Hux does not yet believe Ben is still alive; many things may wear a dead man’s face and use his name. 

“Stop, gentle man, and let alone. What makes you pull the rose, what makes you break the tree? What makes you come to Carterhaugh without the leave of me?” The voice is how Hux recalls Ben’s, deep in his chest and clear, but now strangely flat.

“Carterhaugh is not your own, and roses you have many,” Hux snaps, gesturing at the forest and its scattered blooms. Ben’s time in the forest has made him presumptuous; he’s hardly any kind of king here, to say who might come and go with his permission. “I’ll come and go all as I please, and not ask leave of any.”

Hux moves to draw himself up to his full height; he might not have Ben’s breadth or muscle, but neither is he helpless and he remembers being able to look Ben in the eye. As he stands, the thing that was once Ben launches himself at Hux, throwing them down among the thorns and grasses. Hux snarls and bites and kicks, and Ben’s grasp tears his clothes and hair. Ben’s eyes are black and empty; Hux recalls the stories of men ensorcelled by the Lords and Ladies. Some otherworldly thing has Ben in its thrall, has made him its knight, maybe even against his own will. 

None of this stops him from drawing the silver knife from his boot and cutting at the place where Ben’s heart should rightfully be. Before Hux can draw blood, Ben’s hand closes around Hux’s wrist and his eyes are suddenly, terribly clear. He stares at Hux in horror and recognition.

“You--I know--Sheriff?”

Hux takes his distraction as a chance to throw him over and crouch with the silver blade to Ben’s throat. “Who are you?”

“I am--” Ben’s eyes roll in confusion and fear, trying to shy away from the silver at his skin. Hux smells something like stale smoke. “Kylo Ren is my name. I am Queen Mab’s knight.”

Hux could cut his throat here and be rid of a danger to his village. People could go through the forest without fear of whatever awful toll Kylo might take from them, rings or gold or their very lives. He could end it.

And yet he does not. He stands, kicks the fallen knight in the ribs, and turns on his heel.

“Wait,” calls a voice from behind.

Against his better will, Hux turns and sees Kylo Ren on the ground, a hand outstretched. 

“A token you must leave with me.”

Hux feels his usual sneer draw his lip up. “I’ll leave this with thee,” he says, and gives Kylo the forks. 

Kylo makes a wet, wheezing sound that Hux slowly realizes is something akin to laughter. “Shoot me all you like, you’ll only waste arrows. A token,” he repeats.

“You’ll have no token from me.”

“Then your maidenhead.” Kylo’s grin is sickly and too wide.

Hux wrenches a ring from his index finger and hurls it at Kylo, and spits, and leaves the greenwood in a black fury. It is night when he stumbles through his own door and locks it with the iron pin, the moon shining through the window like a great blind eye. He strips out of his clothes and catalogues the damage; burrs and thorns have caught in the wool, Kylo ripped a couple seams of his shirt, and his cloak is heavy with leaves and twigs from the forest. He imagines he can still smell the stale burning of Kylo Ren. 

Sleep is a thick, bloody thing when it finally arrives. His dreams are of the greenwood side, of things with too many eyes of the wrong colors, of teeth and scraping metal, of hot breath and a pulse racing under his grip. When he wakes, the red cat that keeps mice out of his stores is curled up nearly on his face. She ignores his attempts to dislodge her, and settles deeper into his pillow. 

The rage lasts for nearly a month, driving Hux from sleep or rest or companionship. So much as glancing at the edge of the forest makes his blood boil. Somewhere in the shadows, Kylo Ren lurks and preys on Hux’s people while the Sheriff himself sits on his heels and dreams visions of hoarfrost and gore and too-close red stars. The dreams are worse than ever, and more often than not Hux wakes with the distinct feeling of having been watched by something more than his cat. He wakes sweating and gasping and unsettlingly warm, as he felt in past occasions of sharing his bed. But nobody sleeps in his home, not even him. His mind turns to Kylo Ren and his stomach twists in something other than revulsion. 

And so he storms back into the trees barely before November, teeth grit, silver blade already in hand, ready for Kylo Ren or the Devil or the whole wild hunt itself. Birds scatter from the branches as he plunges forward, black smears against the snow-gray sky. The red leaves have fallen by now, a tide of gold and brown; Hux leaves a black wake behind him and his trailing cloak. Nothing in the forest looks familiar, he has no memory of the place Kylo Ren appeared, and Hux curses him and the trees and the thin light and the ground itself under his feet. 

He seizes one of the ugly rosebushes near the root and tears. This time he has gloves, cured leather that protects his skin from the biting thorns. The roots make an awful ripping sound as they come free of the cold earth and Hux hurls the whole bush across a clearing before starting on another one. He’s moved on to the fourth bush before he hears Kylo Ren’s voice.

“Pull no more!” he demands. “What makes you break the tree? What makes you come to--”

“I come to Carterhaugh because you have cursed me!” Hux shouts. “I cannot close my eyes but I dream of thee!”

Kylo laughs like ice cracking in a thaw, hollow and deep. “How can I have cursed you? I am but a man, I have all the power you do.”

Given the afflictions and terror of those who return from the greenwood, Kylo is hardly powerless, Hux thinks, but all the same he bares his teeth and fumes. “Then whatever else is in this place has cursed me with you.” 

“Perhaps you’ve cursed yourself with me.” Kylo shrugs. “My Lady wouldn’t be bothered with you.” Something in his tone is envious; perhaps he wants his Lady to himself. Perhaps he wants Hux to himself. 

Before he can think better of it, he throws himself at Kylo Ren; all he can think of is ridding the forest and himself of the man-shaped thing ruining his sleep. He’ll be dead and damned before he suffers this to continue in his land. He lands a blow on Kylo before the knight can react, and seizes a fistful of black hair to drag him down to the ground. Hux doesn’t have much chance against someone Kylo’s size on his feet, but he prides himself on being a vicious grappler. 

Kylo isn’t surprised for long, but the couple seconds let Hux crack a heel against the back of his knee and they go down in a twist of limbs and razor edges. Kylo swings a huge fist at Hux’s face, but Hux holds him down and grinds his face into the fallen leaves. Blinded, Kylo thrashes and kicks and shouts, but Hux has him by the throat and all his weight on Kylo’s chest. 

“You kill and ruin those I protect, you take fiendish, obscene fees from them for passing where all ought pass freely, and you plague my waking and sleeping from afar! I should kill you and take your head back with me as a sign to all else that dares threaten us.”

“I do only as my Lady commands me!” Kylo growls through a mess of leaves, black eyes nearly turned back into his skull to look at Hux, who sneers.

“Your Lady commands you to take men and women who cross your path, in all aspects?” He’s heard stranger things, he supposes, although how that might benefit the Lady is beyond him.

“My Lady commands me to protect her greenwood from all who intrude. If I frighten them away with tales and horrors from others, my work is done.”

Hux holds the blade of his silver knife to Kylo’s throat, his hand grown sore from the constant grip. Kylo shies away from the smith-worked metal exactly as he did before, trying to glance down at it as if to be certain what it is.

“Tell me,” Hux says slowly, pressing the blade down, “how did you come to be here?” Ben was not an elf-knight when he stayed in Hux’s village; Hux has seen fairy knights, though few, and he knows their look: the unblinking eyes, the feathers instead of hair, the weapons of bone and fire-hardened wood but never forged metal. Ben wore armor and carried a steel sword before he ventured into the woods.

“I fell--” Kylo chokes. “I was walking, and I fell--a ring--I was a knight, as they that have renown will tell you--please--the Queen of Fairy, she caught me--”

“You were called Ben Solo, I heard you sing.”

“She caught me, she set me to guard her wood--at the end of seven years, she pays a tithe to Hell, and I so young and full of strength, I am feared it shall be myself.” The words tumble out in a rush like a spring stream, ending in something like a sob. Kylo has stopped struggling against Hux’s weight, though the knife remains in place. “On the night of Hallow E’en, the fairy folk will ride by and--and he that would his true love win may, at the crossroads at midnight you must wait, find the fairy court--”

“True love?” Hux stares closely at him; he cannot have heard properly. “You? Where is your own true love? Where is mine?”

Kylo’s gaze meets his and Hux flushes down to his collarbones; he’d not wanted to examine the content of those dreams too closely for fear of what they might reveal. “Perhaps I have more power than most men.”

“Perhaps,” Hux agrees under his breath. “The crossroads. Go on.”

“At midnight, the court rides by to the sacrifice grounds. The Queen of Fairy will ride upon the white horse, and I upon the black. You must pull me down, and hold me tight and not let me go. The Queen will change me into awful shapes, but you must hold me tight and fear me not, I am your own true love.” Kylo’s eyes are too dark, too wide, too like those of a trapped animal for Hux to doubt his word. 

“Should I win you from the Fairy Queen, it’s my knight you’ll be,” Hux warns him, tucking the silver knife back down his boot.

Kylo nods; when Hux stands, Kylo remains on his knees and reaches for Hux’s gloved right hand, the knuckles of which he presses to his lips. He clutches Hux’s hand against his mouth, eyes closed as if in prayer. “Your knight,” he agrees. “Hallow E’en night, midnight, the Miles Crossing. Please, Hux.”

He sees no living thing on his walk back to the village. The Hallow E’en night is a couple days off, and he spends those days and their nights pacing and sharpening things and wondering what in God’s name he’ll do with a pet changeling knight. If he had such a knight, he might sleep in the cold, hollow castle. If he had such a knight, he might become a king. In his dreams, the halls of the castle are hung with tapestries, torches in sconces lighting a blessed man’s cloth-of-gold hair. In his dreams, he stands at the head of a long, high hall, in a cloak of red wool; in his dreams, a man wearing a monster’s face sits on a black throne beside his own white. 

He wakes and gropes for the form that should by rights stretch down at his side. Hux is not inclined to share his bed, but he could suffer Kylo Ren to lie next to the wall. Such warmth would be nice, he thinks, October’s chill breath already seeping under the rugs on his bed. 

When the sun sets, Hux wraps his great black cloak about his shoulders and mounts on the implacable gray horse he takes for long distances. It snorts, but follows his guidance to the Crossing; in another life, he thinks fondly, the beast might have been a warhorse and not an overgrown farm beast. He tethers it to a tree and settles into the roots of another, and lights his pipe to wait out the dusk. 

Night falls, black and thick as the cloth of Hux’s dreams, moonless and wicked. He imagines he can hear the dryads and nyxies whispering to each other in the trees and streams, laughing at him for daring to oppose the Queen of Fairy, Mab herself. His horse drowses, its great mottled head drooping, huffing out clouds of steam. Sudden fear seizes him. He knows nothing of the steeds the fairy court might ride; do they ride horses like men? Do they ride bears or giant wolves or evil wyrms? He grinds his nails into his cold palms, grounds himself in the prickle. He would fight man-eating, fire-breathing hell horses. He has come this far, he is not a man to back down. He’s given Kylo his word, and if he breaks his promise he may as well be dead. A dishonest man is worth very little in Hux’s estimation. 

It starts with bells, heavy tolling like a funeral knell, bells he feels in his feet and his breastbone. Just as he thinks he can brace himself against the bells of the deep, the high ones start, thin short notes that make his mouth twist and his teeth grind against the scent of cold metal. The wind carries the notes out of order, the air itself playing for the Queen. Hux kills his pipe and draws his hood over his bright hair; even the night can’t disguise it. 

Calling the Queen’s horse white is a disservice to snow, to marble or alabaster. It is like a pearl became a living thing, luminous from within: or perhaps it is the Lady herself who glows, green skirts flowing past the horse’s belly, her lily-white face calm and hard. She wears no crown but her own black hair and the light of the stars. Silver bells hang from the horse’s bridle and it snorts pearlescent steam. Its tread is crushing and final.

But Hux’s eye is drawn to the black horse and its rider. Kylo Ren’s skin is all covered but his hands and face, almost as fair as the Queen’s against his thick black robes. His head is crowned with wreath of dead brush, his hair combed smooth from its previous tangle. Like the Queen, he rides without a saddle, a silver-worked bridle the only tack on his mount. His eyes are fever-bright, fixed ahead as if he dares not look for Hux and risk hope. 

Barely daring to breathe, Hux waits for the Queen to pass, slowing tensing and waiting to tackle Kylo from his horse. Should he cry out, warn Kylo, perhaps startle the Queen? The black horse approaches, featureless but for the gleam of its eyes in the gloom. Hux imagines he can feel its warmth.

And before he knows what he’s doing, he’s leapt out and tangled his fingers into Kylo’s robes, throwing his full weight away from the black horse, hauling its rider down to the frost-white ground. An absurd protective urge flares in his chest, and he flings himself atop Kylo, wrapping his arms around him as tightly as he can.

The black horse snorts and shys when Kylo falls with a cry, and in turn spooks the Queen’s horse; she whirls around in a flurry of white mane and green silk, her face full of the fury of a thunderhead. 

“Who are you,” she cries, “that you come to steal away my noble knight?” Her voice is terrible, inhuman, reaching into and sounding out of Hux’s very bones. 

“He is my true love,” Hux says. “I claim what is my own.” Kylo squirms under him, and Hux tightens his grip. He’ll not let go as long as he has life in him, not until Kylo is free of the Queen’s curse. 

“Kylo Ren,” Mab hisses, “if I had known, I should have pulled out both your eyes to give you eyes of stone!”

Something twists against Hux’s ribs--something fleshy and out of place, as if some part of Kylo is trying to escape. Hux turns his gaze to the man in his arms in time to see his eyes wide with terror. At first Hux doesn’t understand what he sees: Kylo shivers before him as if in a heat haze of summer, his shoulders shifting under his robes.

Then Hux feels the crunching and thinks he might faint. Kylo’s bones grind and warp under Hux’s hands, his long face elongating even further, thin jaw thinning further. When he opens his mouth to groan in pain, his teeth are as long as Hux’s fingers and shaped to rend. His dark eyes turn yellow, pupils huge with agony and panic. Muscles twist and crawl under Hux’s grip; Kylo makes an awful retching sound, and cloth tears. Thick gray fur sprouts across Kylo’s skin and he rips at it with his gnarled hands, halfway to paws.

Within minutes, Kylo’s gasps turn to shallow, quick breathing. In his arms, Hux holds a monstrous, trembling wolf tangled in Kylo’s robe. The beast snaps its jaws and slavers, lips pulled back to show pink gums. And yet, Hux keeps his hold around the struggling animal, its claws shredding Kylo’s fine clothes. 

“I should have pulled out your very heart, to give you a heart of wood,” Mab rages down at the crumpled knight. 

From Hux’s embrace, the wolf snarls at the Queen, thick hackles raised and tail between its legs, almost against its belly. As soon as the wolf starts to calm, Kylo’s body twists and his breath stutters. Again, his ribs crack and reform, his muscles tear and reseal in places they oughtn't, his teeth grinding and his jaw widening. His eyes darken from yellow to black and his fur grows coarse and short. The claws on his hands are as long as Hux’s fingers, and as he clutches at Kylo, they dig into his clothes and flesh. 

And still, Hux does not let go. Kylo snarls and roars; Hux fears he’ll be crushed by the bear in his arms, his hands barely able to meet around Kylo’s neck. Kylo is grim in his pain, caught between lunging for Mab and huddling against Hux for protection, as if one man is any help to a raging bear. The massive thing growls, frothing in fury and terror; Hux wonders if Kylo recognizes him enough to not gore him alive. 

Mab hisses and curses in languages that grate on Hux’s ears and soul, languages he’d expect from a devil, not the Queen of a fair realm. Every time Kylo is in danger of settling into whatever new form Mab devises for him, she wrenches him into some new shape. He’s blind with suffering and fear, eyes unfocused and flickering about for something to fix on. Hux clings to Kylo, the knight now a great thrashing snake, cold scales nearly slipping through Hux’s exhausted fingers. The snake could crush a horse in its coils, it looks large enough to kill and eat a grown man, but Hux keeps his grip, constrictor now the constricted. Kylo’s forked tongue flashes out of his unhinged jaws, longer than Hux’s own hand from wrist to fingertip. 

When Kylo had told Hux how to break the curse, Hux had scoffed at such a simple task. Hold a man in his arms from midnight to dawn? Hardly a challenge. Now, with his whole body wrapped around Kylo’s ever-shifting shape, Hux wonders which is worse, the pain in his shoulders or the numbness in his fingers. He has to look to be certain his hands are really clasped together in front of Kylo, stiff and locked with the cold of the night and his death grip. At this point, he doubts he could let go even if he wanted. 

Something wet and slick touches Hux’s skin and he shudders. Is Kylo bleeding? Spit and foam from the terrified beasts Kylo has been already soaks his hands and arms, Hux is sweating from his own fear and exertion; wetness does not come as a surprise, but the uneven surface of the wet thing does, too limp to be fingers or paws, too grasping to be a tail. He looks at the struggling mass in his arms, and his stomach turns. The thing is nearly as red as Hux’s own hair, but shapeless and writhing. A square-pupiled eye, bright as polished gold, stares at him and a bird’s beak nips the air. Its arms--legs?--he doesn’t know what they are, but they’re all over him, under his torn clothes, pushing at the softest, most helpless part of his body. Such boneless things shouldn’t be so strong; he can’t feel a single bone or sinew in the thing, and he crushes it to his chest, desperate to keep his side of the deal with Kylo. An arm wraps around his waist and squeezes, lined with something like toothless mouths latching onto his skin. Hux shudders in disgust and nearly drops the thing that must once have been Kylo Ren on the cold ground right then and there. 

The thing in Hux’s arms twists and thrashes and squeezes, boneless and horribly strong, leaving strips of coin-shaped bruises. Its beak snaps at his arm, takes out a sliver of skin and fat, he almost thinks he can see the bone before blood blots it out and trickles down his fingers.

Again, Kylo changes in his grip, his body growing rigid and rough; soon, Hux holds a log of wood—on fire, crackling like hell’s own flame. He imagines he can hear Kylo pleading for him not to let go under the hiss and snap of burning wood, begging for Hux to fear him not, to free him from the Queen. Hux fears he can smell his own hair burning, can feel his clothes charring pressed against the log.

Time runs flat and slow, like a winter river. Hux feels nothing but the pain in his arms, his legs, his neck, his eyes. He hears nothing but Mab’s shattered-mirror voice, Kylo’s gasps of agony, the crunch and groan of his body twisting under Mab’s alien will. He sees only the thing in his arms that was once and may one day be a man again. Kylo’s eyes, when he has them, never leave Hux’s, staring unblinking like a lunatic at the moon.

Hux wonders if dawn will ever come, if he has somehow become trapped in the Queen’s power, forever damned to cling to his true love while Mab’s wine-dark eyes blaze down at him from her seat on her dancing steed. The chill of the night has long since sunk into Hux’s bones; he is beyond weary. Perhaps this is his fate, to forevermore freeze and tremble on the edge of exhaustion like a whipped horse. Never again will he see the light and warmth of the sun.

Kylo’s robes are shredded from his claws and thrashing, strips of fair skin raw with cold and the burn of Hux’s own clothes. Mab has abandoned all earthly tongues, cursing Kylo in a sound like hornets and green glass. In the graying darkness her glamour wavers, her face a player’s mask painted over a skull, a face as if created by something that has only heard stories of human beauty. She grows more awful and wild as the moon sinks, and Hux knows her power is starting to fade. 

Slowly, the thing in Hux’s embrace turns into a man, the very man he pulled down from the horse, trembling and panting as if still a frightened animal. Hux pets his black hair, tangled with the ruins of his crown, and his skin, flushed from cold and the struggle, and Kylo buries himself against Hux’s chest. As the sun rises, his shaking slows and nearly ceases, sometimes strengthened by the wind in the trees or the call of a bird. 

Day breaks all at once, yellow light trickling between the branches. Mab shrinks back on her horse, now a death’s head of a thing, and no sooner has the light touched its hoof but she rips at the bridle, wheeling the horse about, away from the dawn. She does not even care about Kylo or his true love to leave them with a final curse. 

In the silence, Hux draws his black mantle off his own shoulders and about Kylo Ren, who is naked as a newborn child. He’s sickly pale, weary and worn, quaking like the wild animals he once was.

“You held me tight, and feared me not,” he says at last, voice raw as the winter wind.

“You are my own true love, what have I to fear from thee?” Hux replies. “Have you any clothes of your own?”

Kylo shakes his head. “My… the Lady took all I had with me when I fell, and gave me fairy raiment. Fine and costly, perhaps, but… gone and lost to me now. It’s my sword and harp I miss most,” he says, apparently unmoved by the loss of his trousers.

“The world has swords and harps aplenty,” Hux says as gently as he’s able. “You shall have each in time. Come away with me, out of this greenwood, and rest awhile.”

Tall and broad though he is, Kylo needs Hux to help him up and on to the great gray horse still tethered to the tree. None of the night’s unfoldings have bothered it, and it stands with its head drooping, a back hoof cocked up to sleep. Hux rouses it with a soft word and a hand on its flank, wraps Kylo all in his cloak and helps him astride. The horse cannot carry the two of them together, so Hux leads it back to his village. Walking soothes his cold, sore limbs, and brings prickling pain back to his chilled hands. 

Even so soon after dawn, the village is awake and stirring, though none question Hux and his new knight. He lays Kylo Ren down next to the wall and brings him ale and bread, and neither of the two speak; they have no need.

“I owe my life to you,” Kylo says, after two nights of rest in Hux’s bed. 

“Yes,” Hux agrees around his pipe. “It’s my knight you’ve sworn to be.” He intends to hold Kylo to his word, given under threat of captivity and punishment though it was. 

It’s then that Kylo Ren’s gone to his knee, the freed elf-knight once in the hold of Queen Mab, swearing his life to a mortal man. None can separate them, neither man nor God nor beast, and again Hux’s eye turns to the empty keeps of the castle on the hill. He’ll have his kingdom yet, while his knight’s dark head rests in his master’s lap.


End file.
